Brush on Drum

Thursday, 17 August 2017

UPPING YOUR ZIGGY:
HOW DAVID BOWIE FACED HIS CHILDHOOD DEMONS – AND HOW YOU CAN FACE YOURS

Oliver James

(KARNAC) www.karnacbooks.com

ISBN 978-1-7822049-0-9 Softcover. 192 pp.

This is a tale of two half-brothers. One of them, Terry,
became schizophrenic and committed suicide. The other, David, reinvented
himself and became one of the biggest rock stars of the last fifty years. There
was a history of mental illness in the family – three maternal aunts also went
mad – and a toxic legacy of shared childhood from which David emerged as the
favoured son and Terry as the emotionally neglected sibling.

James’s book is part psychobiography and part self-help
manual. The author is a practising therapist and a firm believer in ‘nurture’
over ‘nature’. Genes play little part in determining who we are, he says: childhood
adversity causes psychosis, not genes. Believing his family cursed by madness,
Bowie avoided the same fate for himself by inventing ‘personas’ – Ziggy
Stardust, Aladdin Sane, the Thin White Duke – and playing them out on the
public stage until he reached a state of psychic equilibrium in midlife and
made peace with himself. This is a model, James argues, for how we can all
develop a dialogue between different parts of the self and reintegrate them,
producing new personas and pushing old ones into the background.James began writing his book before Bowie’s
untimely death in 2016, so he cannot be accused of ‘cashing in’. He traces
effectively how Terry’s experiences surface in his brother’s lyrics and how personas,
Ziggy in particular, enabled ‘David Bowie’ (another assumed identity) to
reconnect with David Jones (his birth name). I was less convinced by James’s
efforts to turn Bowie’s psychodrama into everyone’s struggle to keep it
together. Many of us find something to identify with in Bowie – be it the sense
of alienation, the gender-variance, the self-questioning, the restless need like
the whale shark’s to keep swimming in order to stay alive. But there was only
one Ziggy.

Sunday, 5 March 2017

There was soul, gospel, Brill Building pop, Motown, doo-wop,
the jazz of John Coltrane and Miles Davis, a touch of Broadway, even a hint of
opera. It was a frantic synthesis of so many of the styles I was coming to
appreciate. I never expected to find them together in one place, and the
mystery was compounded when I found them in someone about as far removed from my
nerdy suburban self as it was possible to get. Laura Nyro was a feisty
Italian-American from the Bronx, of mixed Jewish-Catholic background. But it is
to her that I owe my lifelong passion for women singer-songwriters.

I’d probably encountered her before without even realising
it. Her earliest songs were picked up by other artists. I remember Pan’s People
on Top Of The Pops, a vision in white
polyester, applying their painfully literal choreography to ‘Wedding Bell
Blues’, a hit for The 5th Dimension in 1969. Then an older brother
bought The Rock Machine I Love You, a
CBS sampler that included ‘Stoned Soul Picnic’, and I had my first exposure to
Nyro’s own voice. Alternately soothing and shrill, ranging unfettered over
several octaves, it was not quite of this world. Of course, I had to have the
album from which this track was drawn.

Nothing, I discovered, about Eli And The Thirteenth Confession was conventional. Famously, the
original US pressing used perfumed ink on the lyric sheet, enabling Nyro’s college
fans to identify each other by smelling its lingering aroma in each other’s
dorms. No such luck with my UK copy. And some olfactory prompts would have been
useful, for I never met anyone else who shared my taste, or even knew how to
pronounce her name correctly (think “Nero”, like the Roman emperor).

The lyrics were obscure but poetic (“Silver was the colour | Winter was a snowbell | Mother of the windboys
| Livin’ off the lovewell”). Sometimes she just made words up: “Surry down to a stoned soul picnic”. Humpty
Dumpty tells Lewis Carroll’s Alice that words mean whatever he chooses them to
mean: this seemed to be Nyro’s position likewise. I envied her for getting away
with it. At other times a line of pellucid simplicity would jump out at you: “Emily, you ornament the earth | For me”. Her
world was peopled by larger-than-life characters, God, the Devil, someone she
called ‘The Captain’. Later in life, her music loosened up (to its detriment,
in my view) and she’d refer to this early work as “a little crazy”, but to a
young man ill at ease in his own skin it was a revelation.

There were celebrations of alcohol (‘Sweet Blindness’) and a
cautionary tale about drug abuse (‘Poverty Train’). I suspected that the
concerted whole was a song-cycle about coming of age. For a teenage boy
grappling with the “facts of life”, she seemed to allude to dark secrets. The
invitation on the final track to “super
ride inside my lovething” was the most explicit proposal I was likely to
hear all year. Present throughout was an inescapable theme of neediness, of
dependence on a man, but on first exposure my antennae were barely attuned to other
hints in the lyrics. When Nyro's bisexuality was finally confirmed in the obituaries, there were murmurs of “I told you so” as fans looked back to ‘Emmie’, a
track on this early album infused with a near-romantic intensity.

Released in March 1968, when she was only twenty, Eli is a work of astonishing maturity.
Later, as I learned more about her, I understood that the artistry went even
deeper than I’d realised. Having transferred from her original label and won
the support of David Geffen, she was given unprecedented creative control by
Columbia. The careful sequencing of tracks across the two sides of the LP was
hers. She insisted on accompanying herself on piano at a time when girls were
supposed to be singers, not instrumentalists. The abrupt tempo changes and
weird jazz voicings of her piano style were left unregulated. It would fall to
others to make her songs hits by smoothing out their contours, simplifying the
harmony – Nyro stuck to her guns.

What I realise now – but barely intuited at the time – is
that this album lies at a cusp of Sixties music, a time when women were
transitioning from singer with the band or soloist performing songs written by
professional (usually male) songwriters to the empowered singer-songwriter
figure who emerges at the end of the decade. We think of Carole King, and Joni
Mitchell. But it’s no accident that Laura Nyro is the only female songwriter
that Joni Mitchell namechecks with reverence.

She did one concert on British television, in 1971. Somehow I missed that – probably doing my homework – which is a crying shame, as the BBC, with customary disregard for my feelings, has since wiped all but seventeen seconds of the video master. I never did get to see her live. Alas, she died of ovarian cancer in 1997, but she lives on inside me and inside all those whose lives she has touched.

Monday, 23 January 2017

The summer before his death, John Lennon hired a 43-foot
yacht and, with a small crew, sailed to Bermuda for a little R&R. Arriving
after a storm-tossed passage, he rented a house on the island and reconnected
with his muse. The result was his final album, Double Fantasy, named after a freesia he spotted on a visit to the
local botanical gardens.

It’s hard to believe there’s any cranny of Lennon’s life
that hasn’t been picked over, but journalist Scott Neil has found one of the
less-explored and tracked down those he met in Bermuda. The Lennon recalled by
islanders was not the self-obsessed star they expected. He was polite,
laid-back, into healthy eating and clean living. A generous, companionable man
who returned favours and remembered kindnesses shown him. After five years out
of the limelight, he relished going incognito as ‘John Greene’ and rewarded
those who respected his privacy.

The book’s style is a little feverish at the outset, as the “former
Beatle” battles crashing waves, alone at the helm against a “storm of
Shakespearean proportions”. But once the prose settles down, the story is
well-told and the reminiscences deftly woven into a highly readable narrative. It’s
a tale about negotiating celebrity and finding the quietude to write. Songs
like ‘Beautiful Boy’ and ‘Watching The Wheels’ – Neil shows how both were
inspired by events in Bermuda – may not be Lennon’s greatest but they fulfil his
aim of writing for people of his own age group.

The sensitive artwork is by Bermudian artist
Graham Foster, who also designed the memorial sculpture to Lennon in the
Bermuda Botanical Gardens. Best of all are the scattered photos of the singer,
some with son Sean in tow. He looks relaxed, like a man ‘starting over’ (another
song-title), blissfully unaware of what lay ahead.First published in R2 (Rock'n'Reel)

Monday, 5 December 2016

Alan McClure is a man to watch. A 36 year-old from
south-west Scotland, he first crossed my radar as lead singer and chief
songwriter to quirky combo The Razorbills. Now he arrives with a solo album,
confirming his status as a profoundly interesting
writer.

Here he’s backed by The Mountain Sound Session. According to
the press release, they “comprise some of Hull’s finest musicians”, and I’m
inclined to believe it. Most of the songs sit on a bed of sensitive two-guitar
arrangements, McClure’s own fingerpicking blending with Dave Gawthorpe’s classical
guitar. The arrangements never overwhelm the voice.

As ever, McClure’s lyrics take you to unexpected
places. ‘Ugandan Sun’ remoulds a folk motif about forbidden love, complete with
recurring refrain line, to skewer the state-sponsored homophobia of a certain
African nation. The title track is full of his trademark verbal dexterity:
statements are advanced, qualified, withdrawn, forcing you to attend to what
the man’s saying. But he does easy tunefulness as well. ‘The Notion’ has a
relaxed Laurel Canyon vibe, harking back like much of his music to the 1960s,
while ‘Rant’ ironically updates Woody Guthrie’s ‘This Land Is Your Land’ to the
context of Glasgow dockyards and the ‘empty Highland’.

Saturday, 19 November 2016

The voice has aged, raspier in its lower register than in
his Genesis days. But as the (mostly young) audiences chant “PETER! PETER!”
we’re reminded that only a couple of letters separate the showman from the
shaman. “My friends would think I was a
nut / Turning water into wine,” he sings in ‘Solsbury Hill’, as he rides
round the stage on a folding bike. Peter
Gabriel may not be a miracle-worker but he is still a hugely charismatic
presence.

These DVDs (predominantly reissued material) record the tours following the
release of his album Up. The most
spectacular is a 2003 Milan gig, where the band perform on a revolving stage in
mid-arena. Aided by designer Robert Lepage, Gabriel’s love of spectacle is
undiminished. He hangs upside down from an elevated set in ‘Downside Up’,
perambulates the stage in a zorb ball for ‘Growing Up’ as if suspended in
amniotic fluid. Close-ups of Gabriel’s penetrating eyes are intercut with shots
of orange-clad techies toiling like Nibelungs beneath the stage.

The 2004 gigs find Gabriel introducing the songs in French.
The theatricals are toned down, the setlist different. As the previous year, daughter
Melanie joins on backing vocals and there is a touching moment as father and
daughter hold hands in ‘Come Talk To Me’. But the finest cut here is on the DVD
‘extras’: a joyous duet on ‘In Your Eyes’ with Mauritanian Daby Touré.

The band is tight, with long-serving guitarist
David Rhodes a stand-out, and sound quality excellent.First published in R2 (Rock’n’Reel)

Sunday, 1 May 2016

Dredged up from an old computer disk – my clumsy efforts from the 1990s to English three poems by Hugo von Hofmannsthal (1874-1929) written a century earlier. If memory serves, the occasion was the possible publication by Carcanet Press of a volume of Hofmannsthal’s verse. Michael Schmidt, Carcanet’s editorial director, was unimpressed by my locutions, rightly suspecting that Michael Hamburger would have done it so much better. The poems are ‘Manche freilich…’ (1895), ‘Die Beiden’ (1896) and ‘Über Vergänglichkeit’ (1894).

SOME THERE ARE...

Some there are who must perish below,
Where the weighty oars of the galleys scour,
Others dwell aloft by the helm,
Know the flight of birds and the resort of stars.

Some will always lie with heavy limbs
Among the roots of tangled life,
While for others places are set
With the sibyls, the empresses,
And there they will sit as if at home,
Light heads on lighter shoulders.

But a shadow falls from those lives
Across into the other lives,
And the light are bound to the heavy
As the air and earth are bound:

Weariness of quite-forgotten peoples
I cannot dismiss from my eyelids,
Nor ward off from my terrified soul
The silent fall of distant stars.

Many fates are woven next to mine,
Existence merges all of them in play,
And my part is more than this life’s
Slender flame or narrow lyre.

THE COUPLE

She held the goblet in one hand
-- Her mouth and chin were like its rim --
So light and certain was her gait
No droplet from the glass escaped.

So light and firm was his command:
He rode upon a sprightly horse,
And with a single careless gesture
Brought it, quivering, to a stop.

And yet, when it was time for him
To take the dainty vessel from her,
Its weight defied their joint attempt:

For both of them were trembling so
That neither found the other’s hand
And ruby wine spilt on the ground.

ON TRANSITORINESS

Upon my cheeks I feel still their breath:
How can it be that these so recent days
Are gone, gone for ever, as if in death?

This is a thing that no one fully knows,
Beyond lament, too dreadful to erase:
That everything glides by us, ebbs and flows.

And that my own self, quite unbound, appeared
Gliding out from a little child and rose
Towards me silent, like a dog, and weird.

A hundred years ago I too was there
And my forebears, asleep in shrouds, are near
To me, akin as I to my own hair,

Monday, 11 April 2016

Last year, among so many solemn centenaries of the First
World War, we remembered the ill-fated Gallipoli landings – part of a campaign,
intended to knock the Ottoman Turks out of the war, which cost the lives of so
many British and Empire servicemen. The soldier-poet Rupert Brooke never made
it to the landings. Bound for the Dardanelles, his troop ship was moored off
the Greek island of Skyros when he developed septicaemia from an insect bite
and died. He is buried on the island.

Rupert Brooke, “the handsomest young man in England” in the
opinion of WB Yeats, has become a poster-boy for the Lost Generation. His Cambridgeshire connections are well-known.
In 1909 he took lodgings in Grantchester in a former farmhouse called The
Orchard (doubling as a tea room even then) before moving next door to The Old
Vicarage a couple of years later. Early in 1912, frustrated in love and thwarted
in his bid for a Fellowship at King’s College, he suffered some form of nervous
breakdown. Recuperation abroad was recommended, and in May we find him in the
Café des Westens in Berlin, seated at a table by the window, reminiscing about
his skinny dips in Byron’s Pool:

Here I am, sweating, sick, and
hot,
And there the shadowed waters fresh
Lean up to embrace the naked flesh.

‘The Old Vicarage, Grantchester’, from which these lines
come, has become one of his most famous poems, a deft combination of nostalgia,
luxuriant language and whimsy that stays just this side of sentimentality. Or
so I would argue. George Orwell was less impressed:

Rupert Brooke’s ‘Grantchester’,
the star poem of 1913, is nothing but an enormous gush of ‘country’ sentiment,
a sort of accumulated vomit from a stomach stuffed with place-names. Considered
as a poem ‘Grantchester’ is something worse than worthless but as an
illustration of what the thinking middle-class young of that period felt it is a valuable document. [Inside the Whale (1940).]

My impression is that Orwell was a sensitive reader of other
writers. As a thinker of the Left, he was naturally suspicious of writers who
didn’t share his politics, but he was also a big enough critic to appreciate
literary quality wherever it surfaced. If he didn’t find literary quality, he
still recognised that a writer could be read historically as a voice of his
time – which seems to be his approach to Brooke. The long, nuanced essay he
wrote on Kipling shows all these strategies in play. Conversely, a writer could
be on the same side of the political fence as Orwell but still be chastised for
irresponsibility. A few pages after his comment on Brooke in ‘Inside the
Whale’, he takes a pop at Auden. In Auden’s poem ‘Spain’ there’s a reference to
“necessary murder”. Orwell doubts that Auden had seen murder at first hand: “Mr
Auden’s brand of amoralism is only possible if you are the kind of person who
is always somewhere else when the trigger is pulled”. Yet, overall, Orwell
declares the poem to be “one of the few decent things that have been written
about the Spanish war”.

But I digress. Back to Brooke’s poem and his “accumulated
vomit from a stomach stuffed with place-names”. As a Cambridgeshire resident of
twenty years standing, I’m perhaps more attentive to these place names than Orwell
was (he was living in Hertfordshire in early 1940 when his essay appeared).

Brooke’s strategy is first to contrast England, where an “unofficial
rose” blooms under an “unregulated sun”, where feet may trespass on the grass,
with the Teutonic passion for order and regulation:

… and there
are
Meads towards Haslingfield and Coton
Where dasBetreten’s not verboten.

Then he narrows his focus to tell us why, of all
Cambridgeshire villages, he prefers “the lovely hamlet Grantchester”. By
contrast, he says,

… Barton men make Cockney rhymes,
And Coton’s full of nameless crimes,
And things are done you’d not believe
At Madingley on Christmas Eve.

In the margin of the manuscript Brooke wrote a list of
villages to be worked into the poem. Comberton was on the list but didn’t make the
final cut, being replaced by Trumpington. Denis Cheason, in his book The Cambridgeshire of Rupert Brooke,
suggests that Brooke may not even have visited all the places he mentions. In
any case, we locals are not to take offence:

To those of you who are residents
of the villages, do not be dismayed by Rupert Brooke’s comments. He was only
joking, or perhaps belittling neighbouring villages to highlight the
Grantchester which he loved.

No offence is taken, for the choice of names is very
obviously driven by the rhyme scheme: “Coton/verboten”, “rhymes/crimes”. But could there be any more behind it?
In her slim volume on the history of The Old Vicarage, Mary Archer concedes
that the place names “appear to have been chosen more for convenient scansion
than for any accurate local allusion”. However, she goes on to suggest
possible, if far-fetched, sources for the references to Barton and Madingley. For Barton she quotes the anonymous ballad
‘The Knocking Ghosts of Barton’, which is almost in the same octosyllabic metre
as Brooke’s poem:

Jiminy, criminy, what a lark,
You must not stir out after dark,
For if you do you’ll get a mark –
From this knocking ghost of Barton.

And of Madingley it is said that, in the late nineteenth
century, a Rector of High Church leanings promised the villagers a High Mass on
Christmas Eve. The squire forbade his tenants to attend but they went,
defiantly, and were turned out of their homes on Christmas Day. It’s the sort
of story that might have appealed to Brooke, had it come to his ears.

But neither Mary Archer nor Francis Burkitt and Christine
Jennings, in their book Rupert Brooke’s
Grantchester, have any suggestions for Coton. Another work, Coton Through the Ages (Kathleen Fowle and others, 2013), lists a
number of crimes and misdemeanours over the centuries – at least one case of
arson and a fair bit of sheep-rustling – but I don’t see anything likely to
tickle the fancy of the “handsomest young man in England”.

So do these place names go down in the annals of
literature merely as handy rhymes? As “accumulated vomit”? Or are we missing a
trick here?

Friday, 30 October 2015

Her dates are exactly those of Bismarck’s Reich, and her
life was one long protest against it. Countess Franziska (‘Fanny’) zu Reventlow
was born in Husum in northern Germany in 1871 and died in Locarno in 1918. Born
into a conservative and aristocratic family – her sister became a nun and two
of her brothers were members of the German Parliament – she waged a fierce
struggle against her parents throughout her adolescence. The first intellectual
scene of this rebellion was her secret visits to the Lübeck Ibsen Club, where
she encountered free thinkers who propounded artistic and sexual liberation. On
her twenty-first birthday she finally ran away from home and her strange quest
for self-fulfilment began in earnest. She danced at Carnival in a Pierrot
costume. She paid house calls, whip in hand, as a dominatrix. She took acting
lessons and played soubrette parts; more strikingly, she appeared as a rope
dancer at south German country fairs. All the time she dreamed of a circus
life, envying Frank Wedekind his attachment to the Herzog Circus.

After moving to Munich, then artistic capital of Germany,
she tried to become a painter, but in fact supported herself by writing, first
translations from the French, then satirical sketches, and finally novels. A
brief marriage to a Hamburg assessor ended in divorce – her outrageous
behaviour, he said, was ruining his career and good name – and disinheritance
by her family. The birth in 1897 of her illegitimate son Rolf (she kept his
father’s identity secret, saying she had given herself the child) caused
chronic gynaecological problems but did not slow her erotic or literary
schedule. Determined to save him from the German schools system, she educated
him at home.

For the next fifteen years she was a central figure in
Schwabing, then as now Munich’s bohemian quarter, and acted out the ideas which
were common currency in its cafes – defiance of bourgeois convention and
promotion of sexual freedom. In particular, she embodied the newly fashionable
cult of Mutterrecht, the belief that
there had been an older and better civilisation based on women’s rights,
women’s religion and women-centred families. Her lovers were many: though
constantly broke, she always managed to get rich men to pay her way to such
places as Constantinople and Corfu. Her circle of acquaintance was huge: in
addition to Wedekind (whose 1912 play Franziska
is loosely based on her career), it included Rainer Maria Rilke (‘every morning
a poem in my letterbox’, she noted with pleasure) and Max Weber (through whose
intercession she contrived to have her son exempted from military service).

In 1906, at the home of Otto Gross the maverick
psychoanalyst, she met Frieda Weekley, the later Frieda Lawrence, who thought
she ‘had the face of a very young Madonna’. Reventlow is thus one of the
conduits by which the philosophy of Schwabing penetrates English literature: DH
Lawrence portrays her in Mr Noon.
When she left Schwabing for the artists’ colony of Ascona in 1910, it was to
enter into a farcical marriage for money with a Russian baron – an erstwhile
pirate, so he claimed – whose family would only release his inheritance on the
condition that he married an aristocrat. No sooner had the newly-weds divided
their spoils than they lost it all in a bank collapse. She died as she had so
often lived – penniless.

Reventlow was not a political feminist. Distancing herself
from the women’s movement in an essay of 1899 (‘Viragines or Hetaerae’), she
defined herself as a ‘hetaera’ (roughly speaking, a ‘free woman’). She wanted
women to have control of their bodies, which she had fought for in her own
life. Financial independence interested her less. But in her writings, as in
her life, she experimented with alternative ways of life both within and
outside the patriarchal society of the Wilhelmine era.

None of her work is available in English. Perhaps it should
be? Candidates for translation include the clearly autobiographical novel Ellen Olestjerne, the anarchic comic fiction The Money Complex (recently filmed by Spanish director Juan
Rodrigáñez) and the set of ‘amouresques’ From
Paul to Pedro, as well as the wide-ranging Letters
and Diaries.